


Postal

by PaxVobis



Category: Metalocalypse
Genre: (well part of her anyway), Berserkergang, Enemies, Episode: s04 The Doomstar Requiem, Eye Trauma, Gallows Humor, Gen, Going Postal - Freeform, Gore, Gorn, Graphic Description of Corpses, Maggots, Magnus is an idiot, Major Character Torture (Implied), Metal References, Missing Scene, Murder Fantasy, Mutilation, Organs, Torture, Tracking Coda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-26
Updated: 2017-04-26
Packaged: 2018-10-24 07:35:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10737093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaxVobis/pseuds/PaxVobis
Summary: Offdensen and his soldiers intercept a large package addressed to him from "Revenge" in the lead-up to 'Tracking', and containing a number of very compact klokateers and a token of appreciation.  He determines to hunt down those responsible.  Not even a little bit as funny as that sounds, but funnier than it has any right to be.  Gore, rage and obsession in a squalid little basement.R18+ only, explicit gore.





	Postal

Charles Foster Offdensen gave away no hint of his emotions as he climbed the internal fire exit stairs of the building on East Kennedy Boulevard, flanked by half a dozen klokateers - amongst them some heavily armed and armoured, with a disturbing private militia feel to the modified standard uniforms - but the grim, grit-teeth silence that surrounded them, broken only by bootsteps and wingtips on concrete and the heft of deadly equipment, said enough.  Mordhaus was in lockdown and a message had been received.  A crime scene intercepted before it could be processed and so contaminated by the Tampa Bay police; a package in a Florida office tower.

Charles had riled at the interruption, sleepless and emotionally fraying under the stress of their hopeless search and the constant, cryptic haranguing of the Black Klok, straightening aggressively in his chair - more like throne - at the centre of the extended control room.  “So?  Who cares?” he snapped at the poor messenger, a younger girl klokateer involved in their International Crime Recon arm, and she cowered away in the doorway to the control room.

“But sire, it’s addressed to you.”

So they were here.  Charles recognised it as the building that he had once held offices in, but barely - Tampa had gone to _shit_ since he was last here.  A heatwave baking the streets down under a sky darkened by the Doomstar, and the signs of a neighbourhood devoured by crime all around them; trash and broken glass strewn over the pavement, and the smell of hot piss and gas fumes rising off everything in the swelter.  The building was no better, the fire exit filled with haunting graffiti and the piss smell ingrained into the concrete, and a weird, uncomfortable edge of rotted blood - when they came out on the right floor, the offices were empty, their frosted glass inlays smashed, the plaster decaying off the walls with bubbles and cracks.

But it had been his whole livelihood once.  Down the corridor in the smothering, thick heat gloom were more klokateers, waiting for them, and between them a large box.  Charles made his way tentatively down the corridor, composing himself and pulling his mind away from the nostalgia that surrounded him.  The one fluorescent light the klokateers had got going above them flickered despondently.  They stopped at his old office door, the gold letters having long peeled away save for a few flecks and the shadow of _O FD  S N_.  And indeed, the package was addressed to him.

In fact, the sender had gone above and beyond for something that almost certainly couldn’t be handled by the US Postal Service. Once the klokateers assured him it had been scanned for bombs and traps and contained nothing of concern, Offdensen pulled on rubber gloves and crouched beside the box to examine it.  It was perfectly bound with packing tape, didn’t smell of anything - and the sender had even filled out a customs declaration form, slapped on the top.

> ** SENDER’S NAME AND ADDRESS: **
> 
> REVENGE!
> 
> THE DEPTHS OF HUMANITY
> 
> TAMPA, FLORIDA 33602

That cryptic son of a bitch.

> ** ADDRESSEE’S NAME AND ADDRESS: **
> 
> CHARLES FOSTER OFFDENSEN
> 
> 201 E KENNEDY BLVD #2323
> 
> TAMPA, FLORIDA 33602

Charles ran his hand over the box, feeling its smooth edges through the gloves, and then peered closer at the customs form.

> ⬜ Gift     ⬜ Commercial Sample   
> 
> ⬜ Documents     ❌ Other
> 
>  
> 
> ** QUANTITY AND DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF CONTENTS: **
> 
> 3 EACH DEAD GOONS (SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED)
> 
> **WEIGHT ** 526LB 4OZ
> 
> **VALUE** US$387,000 APPROX.
> 
>  
> 
> 1 RECORD CLEANER (COMPONENT ONLY)
> 
> **WEIGHT** 0LB 1OZ
> 
> **VALUE ** US$6.66 APPROX.

And it was signed.  Offdensen recognised that scrawl and that crawling hand, like a spider on mescaline had thrown itself across the page.   _Magnus Hammersmith_.

“You sick little monkey,” murmured Charles under his breath, and sat up, holding out a hand to one of the klokateers.  “He’s bluffing.  Get me a knife.”

Someone handed him a switchblade, and Offdensen set to work gliding it easily through the packing tape and labels - HANDLE WITH CARE - FRAGILE - THANK YOU, a bright orange BIOHAZARD sticker.  Definitely bluffing, too much goddamn detail.  One of the soldiers craned over him, watching as the knife made short work of the tape in Offdensen’s excellent carving hands.

“Uh, are you sure?” asked the soldier, and Charles hummed to himself.

“Magnus is not a good man by any means, but he’s not evil.   The carnage this suggests is physically beyond him, let alone morally.  It has to be a bluff,” he explained, and threw aside the box’s folded lid theatrically, evidently expecting a big box of _nothing._   Instead, there was blue plastic bin bags folded onto each other, filling the box, and a small paper bag, the likes of which one might get at a takeaway place filled with chips, duly stained slightly transparent with grease.

Offdensen stood back, retracting the switchblade with a firm frown.  “It feels, ah, heavier than that, right,” he said unhappily, and the klokateers who had held the fort nodded.  “All right.  You’d better open it, then.”

Charles snatched the paper bag before the klokateers went to work pulling back the blue plastic.  Sure enough, a ghastly smell filled the corridor as soon as the first layer was pulled back, sleeting maggots where the grubs had crawled into the folds.  The bodies themselves were a few layers down – Offdensen could tell by the klokateers’ united lurch back in horror and the increase in the sickening stench – but his mind was focused on the paper bag, defaced with Magnus’ violent scrawl in marker pen:

DONT TEASE ME

SEND DETHKLOK

OR TOKI FOLLOWS

NEXT

And he already knew what it’d be.  But his heart still jumped when he upturned the bag and a severed brown-skinned woman’s toe fell out onto his gloved palm.  It was not quite fresh.  But it wasn’t as stale as he would have liked, either.

“My lord, I’m sorry,” wheezed the soldier who had spoken to him before, his hand over his face and cowering with the others away from the box as Offdensen, soulless, stepped forward to look inside.  The dismembered bodies of the three klokateers had been heaped on top each other inside the blue plastic, black with coagulated blood and swollen with rot, the maggots white flashes glistening over their entwined organs, broken fingers, smashed faces gaping toothless, shattered smiles. 

Standing over the box, Charles was assaulted by his own thoughts.  His mind turned inwards towards the last time he had seen such carnage – at the funeral, and he was standing on the cold earth with his hands clutching the heavy body of Cornickleson, his teeth braced as a blade plunged though the corpse and sprayed his face with black, rotting blood like cold paint, thick and foetid and rolling down his cheek, over his lips, smattering his glasses.  He remembered the cold air stinging his lungs, the serrating, gut horror smell of the corpse, and the filthy blade that bit through his suit and tore at his own body as he matched his attacker strike for strike.

And that face.  Shining under the dim sky as the earth fell away.  A still face twisted in emotionless pride over a frothing maw, the eyes cold and vacant, the skin pale like death and reeking of death.  The metal masked assassin.  It could be no other.  Charles could hear the screams of his followers, projected into his head as they came too close to the pair’s hiding place and were eviscerated for their efforts.  He could hear Abigail’s screams too, bound and facing the knife – or worse, in his mind’s eye, Magnus’ sawed grimace as he severed the joint with wirecutters, the silver face watching over him, goading him on.  In his left hand, dropped to his side, his fingers curled around the toe in a searing white anger, the likes of which threatened to blind him and boil his guts black.

The soldier was speaking.  Charles had barely heard the rest of his speech, deafened by rage and revulsion, and hardly looked up as he tuned into the man’s words. “... we’ve already got arrest warrants out globally for Magnus Hammersmith.  We’ve got private eyes – trackers – what else can we do?”

The manager stood like a cold obelisk over the box, staring into the seething decay.  He rolled Abigail’s toe between his fingers, his mind feeling like the rotting, crawling blood he gazed into.

“Magnus didn’t do this,” he said, his tight voice almost a hiss, and the klokateers hung on his words.  “We knew there was another.  I just didn’t think he was the sentimental kind...”

“Sire?” offered a klokateer, and Charles turned away suddenly, passing the toe and bag over to another of their number.  He pulled his glasses off his face and pinched the bridge of his nose, the metal mask hovering in his mind’s eye, and stood back against the wall.

“Pack it up.  Pack it up, we’re taking it with us,” he snapped, then turned his head away, rubbing his forehead with the glove's latex pulling unpleasantly over his skin in an effort to kill off the shudders and cold sweat.  In Offdensen’s internal world, the assassin was at his mercy, the sledgehammer he’d felled the beast with falling out of his hands to the grubby concrete with a sickening thud as he stepped over the twitching, dying monster.  A pale body smelling of death.  One of the assassin’s hands wrapped around his thigh, tugged at the hem of his shirt, trying to crawl up his body one final time, but Charles had dealt a finishing blow and all it did was shake and leave bloody marks on the white cotton.

In his mind’s eye, Charles took that mask in both hands, standing over the dying man, and peeled it back, tearing the skin with it.  The flesh below was decomposing, putrid grey and yellow skin in strings over the puss and damp scabs running with clear liquid, the blinded, staring eyes.  And he could see his perfect, clean clerk’s hands, his slender fingers, as he plunged his thumbs into the dead eyes, cutting the sclera as thick, heavy gore wept out over them, his fingernails raking across the wounds and scabbed flesh and ripping it back to the bone.

“Are, uh, you okay, my lord?” asked a klokateer, who looked more medical than military in her scrubs.  “You’re, uh, sweating...”

“Oh.  Gee.”  Charles, snapped out of his daydream, retrieved his handkerchief to mop his brow.  “Fine.  Just... mm, must be the heat, I guess.  Are we just about done?”  That seemed to be enough of an answer for her and indeed they were, having taped the box back up and bagged Abigail’s toe.

“Move out, then,” he ordered, shaken, and allowed himself to be shepherded out by the soldiers.  He could always say it was the corpses that had affected him, or the piece of Abigail – corpses were a constant, dismembered co-workers, less so.  But the truth was that Charles was deeply disturbed by what had emerged from the depths of his brain that time, as though the curse of Dethklok had finally begun to poison his mind.  He had never wanted something the way he’d wanted to slowly and excruciatingly murder the assassin right at that moment, to dig his thumbs in to the warm gore and feel his skin beneath his nails, never felt something so strong as his pain and anger, like a blade dragged across steel and screaming in his whole body.

He did not tell the boys what they had found, and when he turned off his light that night, saw the metal mask floating in the dark before him.  And he knew then that the time had come.  He had to quit, before it consumed him completely.

 

\- - - - -

 

Somewhere beneath their feet, Magnus Hammersmith crept down the basement stairs into the dark, his eyes wide, his sallow hand feeling for the light switch.  “Buddy?  Hey, buddy?” he breathed into the still darkness, the air thick, still and smelling like death around him, and he wasn’t sure if Buddy was down here.  But he gibbered on anyway, his voice shaking: “I, uh... I got rid of the box, like you said, with the guys... heh.  They’ll definitely find it... that’ll put the fear of god into ‘em!  I mean, of us. I mean, ha! What a, uh... what a prank, ha ha...!”

“ **GOOD** ,” came the voice of Buddy from the darkness, and Magnus saw a blade glint in the shadows.  Between them, shapes moved in silhouette, the skittering of rats, the soft songs of suspended chains tapping against one another in the dark.  Magnus froze on the stairs, knowing he had to go through to get to his sanctuary with Toki and the woman.

“Man,” whimpered Magnus, “It smells really bad down here,” as if he didn’t know exactly why.  He’d managed to avoid watching Buddy dismember the soldiers Dethklok had sent, and had barely even peeked when presented with the bin bags full of bodies.  He guessed Buddy didn’t really like to hose up.  It was enough of a chore hosing, you know, he and she down, after, you know... you know?  Let alone like, blood.  But there had to be a line, right?

 **“THEY SENT MORE MEN,”** snarled his buddy, and Magnus heard something soft in the dark, **“BUT I DEALT WITH THEM...”**

“Okay,” he said, and his hand found the lightswitch.  He’d need it to get to sanctuary.  Better just deal with it, blood all over the floor.  “Um, mind if I?” he tried, and Buddy gave a gnash he’d come to recognise as _Whatever._

Magnus turned on the light.

Dead humans, everywhere.  Organs.  Hanging from hooks like surreal still-lifes, mixed intestines melting off meathooks, a jumble of parts on the floor and on the bench Buddy craned over, hands and brains and lungs and faces and _all the bits, man_.  Where the bits were _not supposed to be_.

Magnus clung to the wall and slid down it, his brain silent with horror as his mouth dropped open, anything but: “ _OH MY GOD...!_   _WHAT DID YOU DO....!”_

But there was no backing out now.  And besides, goons were just goons.  Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a step _beyond_ the wire cutter thing, all the same.

**Author's Note:**

> perhaps the best thing is this was an accidental fic prompted by a "cfo/mma" request and a random roll of "love letters" for the theme. hope you enjoyed! i thirst for comments like offdensen thirsts for the gooey stuff inside mma's eyes.


End file.
